Popular Figma Plugins
For those of you who haven't used Figma before, it's a design tool similar to Adobe XD and Sketch, which also has other wonderful plugins and stuff that help automate your work as a UX/UI Designer.
So let's start with the plugins. You can find these if you right-click anywhere on your Figma page and go to plugins and click on browse for more.
There are hundreds of creators that have helped to create these, kudos to them, as I know it is quite hard to create something new and also make it work.
There are unfortunately some of them that are not super reliable, but we are going to focus today on those that do work.
You can select layers with similar properties and edit them in a batch.
How to use it:
For example if I want to change the colours of these rectangles, you can go to plugins, select the Similayer plugin, I select the fill colour because that is the property I would like to change for that particular object. I click on select all layers and that will select all the layers on the artboard for my particular design. Then I go to fill and now if I change the colour it's changed the colour on all similar objects that were selected.
I think this is one of my favourites, because before a lot of times I had to go on the actual Unsplash website to download free images to use in my UI, so this is perfect.
How to use it:
You simply select the shape that you would like to add an image to, you right-click and go to plugins, select Unsplash, a pop up will show up, and you can select any of the free images, either from images you already have or you can click on the search tab. Once selected it will automatically apply to your shape.
Another favourite of mine, Content Reel generates and populates your components with content. It saves loads of time, as you can see. You don't need to invent names or google free nice pictures which are hard to find, you simply have everything in this plugin.
How to use it:
To use it you simply have to right-click on the artboard, select plugins again and pick Content reel. On this pop up you select the layer you want to change, and from the list you can select your data. For example, I can select names or change this to dates. So the plugin offers you the option to change text, images and icons.
This is a data population plugin that inserts relevant maps into Figma and that you can also edit in-line. Instead of you googling the place and snip it every time and copy-paste and so on, believe me, again time saver.
How to use it:
Let's say we want to add a map on this rectangle. For this again you go to your plugins section, select Mapsicle. On the left side, we will have the map, I can zoom in and zoom out, but if we want to have something more specific then we can set a token with map box. But just for now, we will select this snip of San Francisco. We just select the map as we want it, create map, and that will insert the map. Now, if we want to update the map, we just need to go back to plugins, by right-clicking on the map, go to Mapsicle, and now we can change the view of our map, and once we are done we can click on update map.
It's pretty much what it says in the name (Brandfetch). You fetch the logo of big brands out there. I cannot tell you how many times I needed this in my life and was wasting my time so much, in order to find the png. And obviously, because I am not the most organised person in this life, I would repeat this action for possibly the same brand over and over again. Well, this stopped when I saw this plugin.
You know when you might need some 3D stuff and you don't have the time to start drawing or you cannot find anything online. Roto does just that. Takes 2D objects into 3D. Amazing. Built using an open source 3D JavaScript library, Roto lets you manipulate the angle, depth, or perspective distortion of a shape.
That is all for today. Hope you enjoyed this short blog post.
Take care!
